I, too, am a Southerner!

In the wake of protests and conversations over Confederate monuments, Teresa Cosby, a Furman University politics and international affairs professor, pens a column for the Greensboro News & Record. A child during the time of school segregation, Cosby writes about Southern heritage and the “lost cause” narrative advanced by Confederate monuments and symbols, and by some South Carolina textbooks that were used in classrooms as recently as the 1980s. The problem, she says, is that the “lost cause” storyline ignores what Black people lost. “In clinging to this heritage argument, white Southerners who still insist there is something pure about their history are really clinging to notions of white supremacy,” she writes.

Cosby holds a J.D. from Howard University and specializes in constitutional law and racial and ethnic politics.